National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, Americans are deeply troubled by the images and news of parents being separated from their children at the southern border. The Trump administration's policy of zero tolerance at the border has already resulted in 2,300 cases of forced family separation, according to Homeland Security statistics obtained by the Associated Press. The pace of separations has increased from nearly 50 to nearly 70 a day.

Any parent could imagine how difficult this is, how heartbreaking it is to be forcibly separated from your young son or your young daughter, looking at their faces as they wonder: What is going on here? Why are they taking my parents away from me? It is just as heartbreaking to imagine the separation and the anxiety it produces in everybody.

Let's be clear. Separating children from their parents and denying relief to victims of brutal domestic violence will not make our country a better or safer place. These policies are cruel, inhumane, and so unlike the America we have known for 229 years.

No one who doesn't meet the legal requirements should be allowed into this country; we cannot have open borders, but we have an adjudication process for those cases. In the past, there has been no need to separate parents from children while that adjudication was occurring. The Trump administration has actively decided to take a different, crueler, more callous approach.

Yet what does President Trump do? He has spent the last few days trying to deflect blame. The President has said repeatedly that the separation of parents and children is the result of a law ``the Democrats forced . . . upon our nation.'' That is not true.

Allow me to quote from the Associated Press's nonpartisan, fact-check of the President's claims. Here is what they say:

There is no law mandating the separation of children and parents at the border. The separations are a consequence of a Trump administration policy to maximize criminal prosecutions of people caught trying to enter the U.S. illegally. Trump's repeated, but nonspecific references to a Democratic law appear to involve one enacted in 2008. It passed unanimously in Congress--

That meant Democrats and Republicans supported it-- and was signed by Republican President George W. Bush.

He was hardly a Democrat.

It was focused on freeing and otherwise helping children who come to the border without a parent or guardian. It does not call for family separation.

I know what Donald Trump will say as he tries to undo our American institutions: That is fake news. It is from the Associated Press, which has had a reputation of being down the middle for scores of years.

Let me quote the New York Post editorial, one of the most conservative newspapers in America--hard right. Here is what they say:

The immediate cause of the crisis is Team Trump's decision to start prosecuting illegal border-crossers, rather than simply deporting them.

In the editorial, they ought to go on and say to President Trump: Fix this problem. Stop blaming Democrats. They are not to blame.

President Trump and Attorney General Sessions announced this zero tolerance policy in April, and it went into effect in May. If there were a law requiring it, why hasn't it been going on since Trump became President? They just started it. Chief of Staff Kelly called the policy a ``tough deterrent.'' This has nothing to do with our current immigration laws. It has nothing to do with any Democratic law. This is entirely a decision made by the Trump administration to start separating families.

Let me say this to President Trump: President Trump, you can undo the policy tomorrow, if you want to, with a snap of your fingers. President Trump, if you don't want to change the policy, own up to it and defend it, instead of blaming somebody falsely. Either reverse it, which you can do, Mr. President, or own up to it. But this idea that ``Oh, well, Democrats are to blame'' is false and untrue and not showing much strength or courage of conviction.

HEALTHCARE

Mr. President, over the past few months, insurers in several States-- Maryland, Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, and Oregon--have requested significant rate increases for next year, the result of Republican healthcare policies that have undermined our healthcare system. On Friday, the State of Minnesota sought a decrease in their rates.

Why? What has made Minnesota so different from these other States? Why were the people of Minnesota allowed to breathe a sigh of relief that their insurance costs weren't going up, whether it be the monthly payments or the deductible or the copay?

Why? I will tell you why. Minnesota implemented a State-funded reinsurance program that is helping to backstop their healthcare market. This is what can happen when States support patients and fight back against what President Trump and congressional Republicans are doing. This is what happens when you try to strengthen our healthcare system instead of sabotaging it.

Imagine if every State were like Minnesota. Imagine if every State, for the first time in decades, were dropping premiums and out-of-pocket costs for consumers next year. Think about what a difference that would make in the lives of tens of millions of Americans who pay too much for healthcare and worry that their healthcare bills are going to go up and the quality of their healthcare and availability of their healthcare will go down.

It wouldn't have been that difficult to achieve the goals of Minnesota. We spent months negotiating a bipartisan healthcare stabilization package that included ideas like the reinsurance policy that has been implemented in Minnesota. Senator Nelson from Florida talked about this and wanted to do it; our Republican friends wouldn't.

Senators Murray and Alexander came to an agreement. It would have done a load of good. But rather than pass that bill to strengthen our healthcare system, even after the Republicans tried and failed to repeal the ACA, the Republicans doubled down on sabotage. They just hate the system--the idea that people should get so much help from their government--and they make it worse. As a part of the tax bill, Republicans repealed the coverage requirement and put nothing in its place. Then they added poison pills to the bipartisan bill to make sure it wouldn't pass.

When President Trump canceled the program that helps offset costs for low-income Americans and proposed expanding junk insurance plans that cost a lot and cover very little, our Republican colleagues hardly made a peep.

Recently, the administration has said that it will refuse to defend in court the protections for Americans with preexisting conditions. This is a new one. Our Republican friends now say: We don't want to make sure a family who has a preexisting condition gets health insurance. That is even worse than before.

Last week, the Republican leader said that his whole caucus supports protections for Americans with preexisting conditions. While this is a complete reversal from the various healthcare bills our Republican leadership supported last year, which would have decimated protections for people with preexisting conditions, I applaud him for saying it and hope it represents turning over a new leaf.

Now Senate Republicans have to put their money where their mouth is. When President Trump does things that are so bad for the American people, so bad for his very supporters who depend on healthcare, our Republican colleagues fold. They are afraid of him. I hope that is not the case with preexisting conditions because millions of Americans' lives and health and sanity, at least fiscal sanity, depend on it.

If Republicans were serious about maintaining protections for people with preexisting conditions, they would join us in urging the Trump administration to reverse their shameful decision not to defend the preexisting healthcare law in court. They would join us in urging the administration not to finalize their plan to sell junk insurance policies.

I say to my Republican friends and my dear friend Leader McConnell: Actions speak louder than words. Your simply saying that your whole caucus supports protecting Americans with preexisting conditions doesn't make it so, as the very administration you support tries to undo it.

Republicans should work with Democrats, right now and throughout the summer, to focus on lowering costs for the American people. That starts with telling the Trump administration to defend the vital protections for Americans with preexisting conditions.

I wish to say one more thing on the immigration issue. And President Trump's claim that Democrats need to change the relevant law is no better.

The immediate cause of the crisis is Team Trump's decision to start prosecuting illegal border-crossers, rather than simply deporting them. Because the law severely limits how long the feds can detain the children, immigration officials on the ground then have no choice but to break up the families.

Ryan's answer is to stick a change of the law into the two big immigration bills he has the House voting on this week. But there's no way the Senate will pass either one--indeed, not much chance the House will.

Anyway, making it so Immigration and Customs Enforcement can detain the kids along with their parents is only a minor improvement--since ICE is already running out of space to hold people, and looking at ``tent cities'' as a supposedly temporary expedient.

You can bet that critics will start calling these ``Trump's concentration camps,'' and the term will catch on if they're full of kids.

The polls were starting to suggest that Republicans might not lose big in this November's midterm elections, but they'll turn back the other way if this keeps up--and rightly so.

It's not just that this looks terrible in the eyes of the world. It is terrible: at least 2,000 children ripped from their parents' arms, sometimes literally, in just the first six weeks.

Maybe the White House figures families will stop coming once word gets out, but they won't all stop: Some are fleeing truly horrific situations back home.

We recognize that returning to the policy of two months back creates some perverse incentives: Bring kids along, and you'll just be deported if you're caught. But at least switching back avoids having the U.S. government earning comparisons to the Nazis.

If the president doesn't want to admit defeat, he can just add this to the long list of things he blames on Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Trying to tough this one out is guaranteed disaster.

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, second, I wish to mention this. The House is toying with a bill, supported by some of the less extreme Republicans, and they are trying to deal with this issue of family separation.

First, we haven't seen the copy, but from all reports, it doesn't really deal with this. Second, it is loaded up with so many other poison pills that it is never going to see the light of day.

If our Republican colleagues in the House, who endeavored to pass the discharge petition and failed by a few votes--so they could help the Dreamers--want to do something real about this, about the Dreamers, and about family reunification, the support of the bill that is dead on arrival in the Senate will not assuage their constituents, assuage their conscience, or, most important, fix the problem.

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